In the last few years the ubiquitous availability of high bandwidth networks has changed the way both robotic and non-robotic telescopes operate. Single isolated telescopes are being integrated into expanding “smart” telescope networks that can span continents and respond to transient events in seconds. This development has led to a renaissance in the science of time0domain astrophysics, which is rapidly changing the way astronomers work. Using the emerging field of intelligent agent architectures to provide crucial decision making in software, we have built a distributed system that allows users to schedule observations seamlessly over a peer-to-peer network of geographically widely separated, heterogeneous telescopes. We present the current operations paradigm of the eSTAR1 network and explain how our recent work on event driven observing now provides a seamless cradle-to-grave system for autonomous observations of transient events.